Overview

Ras Al Khaimah, one of the seven emirates of the United Arab Emirates, is recognized as one of the most attractive industrial and business destinations in the Middle East. The Ras Al Khaimah Investment Authority (RAKIA) was established in 2005 to attract investments and promote various economic sectors, including industrial parks, education, media, technology, real estate, logistics, and manufacturing.

RAKIA offers industrial and business investors Free Zone and Non Free Zone facilities in a dynamic and synergistic operating environment, and currently serves thousands of companies. RAKIA’s IT staff supports more than 200 employees at its headquarters, which also houses the company’s data center.

Challenges

RAKIA’s top challenge is to protect a variety of highly sensitive government and business data from cyberattacks. “As a reputable and trusted government entity, it is our duty and obligation to ensure all confidential data is properly safeguarded,” said Sheikh Mohammed humaid Al Qasemi, RAKIA’s managing director.

“IT and data security are amongst RAKIA’s top priority. We’ve built a great deal of trust with our clients over the past and we plan to enhance it even more with our latest IT technologies.” said Ramy Jallad, acting chief executive officer, RAKIA.

After using a Symantec IT security solution, RAKIA realized it needed more robust, end-to-end security with better performance. “We used different solutions to protect our endpoints, email, and website, which was difficult to manage and didn’t provide the visibility into our environment that we wanted. We also experienced poor CPU performance caused by high memory requirements,” said Anwer Mohamed, IT infrastructure manager, RAKIA.

In addition to moving to a virtualized environment in the future, RAKIA plans to extend its IT security with Trend Micro™ Deep Discovery. “The threat landscape is always evolving, and in my view, basic defense starts with Trend Micro Smart Protection Complete. But to guard against new, emerging, and ever-changing threats, we must be able to detect them all— and that’s why we plan to use Trend Micro deep discovery and its connectivity to the other Trend products,” said Yeong.

Solution

RAKIA chose Trend Micro Smart Protection Complete to tightly integrate IT security across their network. RAKIA currently uses several of the Suite’s endpoint solutions, including OfficeScan™, InterScan™ Web Security Virtual Appliance, InterScan™ Messaging Security Suite, and ScanMail™ to protect against data breaches and business disruptions from gateway to endpoint.

In addition to simplifying management and providing greater visibility, RAKIA’s performance issues were resolved. “The Trend Micro end-to-end solution includes packet filtering, port monitoring, and more— yet the solution is lightweight so it doesn’t consume too much memory or CPU power,” said Yeong.

“IT and data security are amongst RAKIA’s top priority. We’ve built a great deal of trust with our clients over the past and we plan to enhance it even more with our latest IT technologies.”

Ramy Jallad,acting chief executive officer, RAKIA

Results

After deploying Trend Micro Smart Protection Complete, RAKIA saw an immediate reduction in security events and improvements to their IT system’s performance. With fewer incidents and faster CPU performance, RAKIA’s IT team has more time to focus on growing the business, and users are more productive. “One of the solution’s most notable results is approximately a 30% improvement in performance, compared to our prior solution,” said Yeong.

RAKIA received excellent support from Trend Micro teams throughout the sales and implementation process. Although they have not required technical assistance since the solution was deployed, RAKIA is confident in Trend Micro’s support capabilities. “I spoke with Trend Micro technical team members in Taipei, and having direct access to that level of expertise makes me comfortable that they’ll be ready if we need them,” said Yeong.

“Having a connected security network was very important to us. We found no other vendor offering end-to-end, 360-degree protection except Trend Micro.”

Sean Yeong Ping Chian,
chief information officer, RAKIA

What's next?

In addition to moving to a virtualized environment in the future, RAKIA plans to extend its IT security with Trend Micro ™ Deep Discovery. “The threat landscape is always evolving, and in my view, basic defense starts with Trend Micro Smart Protection Complete. But to guard against new, emerging, and ever-changing threats, we must be able to detect them all — and that’s why we plan to use Trend Micro Deep Discovery and its connectivity to the other Trend products,” said Yeong